CARL JOHNSON

Breadcrumbs Navigation

Carl Johnson

Head, Program Management Office

As the head of the program management office, Mr. Carl A. Johnson defines and maintains the institute’s standards for portfolio, program, and project management. He and his team facilitate and share resources, methodologies, tools, and techniques across the institute, including planning common tools and information systems for programmatic support. He directs and manages the areas of scheduling, configuration management, and quality assurance to support successful performance of STScI’s contracts.

He served as the head of the operations and engineering division from 2012 to 2017, where he managed staff on the software development and operations teams, which support the institute’s missions, and provided senior-level project and technical management for both the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope.

Before leading the division Mr. Johnson was its deputy head for six years, which allowed him to support and encourage improvements in software, operations, and infrastructure that enable and enhance science for the astronomical community. He has also served as a deputy division head of the engineering and software services division. He has more than 30 years of experience working on scientific space missions in varying positions, including project manager, systems architect, systems engineer, and development team lead.

When he joined the institute in 1990, Mr. Johnson began work as a systems engineer for Hubble, which allowed him to improve its operational efficiency and effectiveness in areas like parallel science, science instrument reconfiguration, and guide star handoffs. He later managed and coordinated the institute’s efforts on the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE) project; and provided systems engineering support for the development of an electronic grants management system. He launched his career as a lead development engineer on Galileo at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.